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After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

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FreedomWorks Paid Beck and Limbaugh to Talk Them Up

Now that Dick Armey has left the astroturf Tea Party group FreedomWorks — with an $8 million golden parachute, of course — he’s dishing out some details on how the group operated. One very interesting tidbit is that the group paid Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh huge amounts of money to say nice things about them on their shows.

Former FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey says the conservative outlet that helped launch the Tea Party paid Glenn Beck at least $1 million last year to fundraise for the organization, an arrangement he said provided “too little value” for the money.

“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. “I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”…

“I put it down now as basically as paid advertising for FreedomWorks by Beck,” Armey said, calling it a mistake…

Armey said he was told of the Beck arrangement when it first began, but that it would only cost the organization about $250,000 a year. “Once that was approved by the trustees, it then took on a life of its own, it got bigger than we understood it to be. All of a sudden it was we are paying Limbaugh as well as Beck.”

Imagine the uproar on Fox News if they found out that the Center for American Progress or the AFL-CIO was paying Rachel Maddow a million dollars a year to give them positive coverage. They’d lose their minds over it.

So Armey got a big chunk of rube money, Beck and Rush got some, and who knows how much the other management of FreedomWorks get.

So tell me again the reason for this Tea Bagger organization? Because looking in from the outside, seems like there’re a lot of Community Chest Monopoly dudes slapping each other on the back and saying, “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”

Why anyone would be surprised by this is beyond me. Conservatives, the Republicans, the Tea Party. It’s all about the money. Does anyone really think either Beck or Limbaugh really buy into the balderdash they spout?

“Immediately after Labor Day, Armey showed up at the FreedomWorks offices with his wife and an aide carrying a gun:

The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.